Obama’s October Surprise - 7.8 % Jobless – Conservatives Angry About Good News

Choosing substance over performance is a novel thing in a world fixated on drama, flash and shiny objects. Mitt Romney unleashed a tsunami of animated policy reversals during the first Presidential debate. On Friday October 5, 2012 President Obama answered loudly when the September unemployment rate came in at 7.8%, the lowest in 44 months.

As soon as the lower unemployment rate was made public some conservatives lost their minds and accused the Obama administration of cooking the books to make the President look good right before the election. Some highly respected business leaders, politicians and journalists went berserk with conspiracy theories. One even said that Obama supporters were misrepresenting their employment status to lower the jobless rate.



Now the picture is crystal clear. President Obama has been trying to bring the economy back from the brink of depression with an opposition party that is admitting it was in their best interest to keep unemployment high until after the 2012 election. Will a political party be held accountable for not doing everything it could to help get Americans back to work? It seems that the tantrums being thrown because it appears that more Americans have found work is a testament that many have placed politics above the needs of the people.

Some need to take a hard look into the mirror and consider their vote. Why would you cast your vote for someone rooting for a higher level of suffering among your fellow citizens because it served their political ambitions? Some may say they would have made things better after they took office, but when you hold public office it should be the American people that come first, not your political party. Delaying any efforts that would have put more people back to work as quickly as possible meant more lost homes, hungry children and despair. There should be a price to pay if anything was intentionally done or not done in order to delay the speediest economic recovery possible.

New Demand, Old Workforce, Not Enough Jobs Ever Again

There is an ugly truth about the job market that economists and politicians will not speak. The United States and the world will never need as many workers as it has in the past to supply more than we could ever buy or consume and with almost everyone in the modern workforce, this is a huge problem. The solution is a global lower standard of living.

Automation has enabled a far smaller workforce to produce huge quantities of goods and services that called for multiples more workers in the past. Everything from automatic teller machines, automatic car washes to personal computers remove job positions from the workforce. One example is a sales division of a company that 15 years ago had an administrative assistant for each sales team that would prepare proposals, presentation materials and take messages. Now sales people use software tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and connect their laptop to a projector to do a presentation. An automated voice response answering system takes messages and the need for the administrative assistant is gone.

Many offices now have an empty desk in their lobby where a receptionist once sat. Often a sign with a list of extensions to call if you need assistance sits alongside a telephone. The combination of personal computer software and automated answering technology has eliminated a huge number of jobs forever. The same thing can be said of factory automation where robots do almost everything with humans often connecting subassemblies built by machines and performing final quality inspections. Millions of jobs have been permanently eliminated by industrial automation.

The other issue is the size of our workforce. Almost everyone is seeking employment. Most suburban neighborhoods are ghost towns during the day because everyone leaves to go to work. There was a time when a married couple would have a stay at home parent if one of them earned enough to support the family and provide a comfortable lifestyle. There have always been situations where both the husband and wife worked out of economic necessity and that was the norm. Something changed and the workforce ballooned when the norm became that the earning capability of a husband or wife was not the determinate of whether both worked. The expectation was for both members of a marriage to get jobs and work.

Social factors like a low rate of marriage and huge divorce rates create social insecurities that drives everyone to work because the thought of being suddenly alone without marketable job skills is too big of a risk.

The expectations of career goals, earning’s growth and enhanced lifestyle changed the definition of what a comfortable lifestyle entailed. Increased consumption from dual high income households combined with the use of credit by everyone fueled an outsized demand for everything from electronics to homes. This inflated demand masked the fact that normal demand could not support our work force.

The financial crisis ripped the scab off the real issue of the workforce and demand imbalance. Many consumers retreated back to an earlier model regarding buying goods and services. We had been on a “just get it if you want it” economic model and suddenly switched to a get it if you absolutely need it mentality. The days of replace it if it’s broken have replaced getting the hot new feature such as a 3D television when your current television will still last for years.

At the same time demand crashed, people ready to exit the workforce through retirement came back in because many had their retirement savings gutted by the stock market crash during the last part of 2008. The combination of low demand and swollen workforce creates a nightmare scenario that unfortunately may be solved by a painful descent into a generally lower standard of living for millions of Americans. We are now dealing with something closer to the real economy, but it happened so suddenly that there was no adjustment period, just pain for many.

Do We Need A National Black Intervention

This not just another shower of negativity about African Americans, but with a 62% high school graduation rate, 4% of black men in prison and 15.4% unemployment rate, do we need a national black intervention?

It is said that we don’t manufacture anything in this country anymore, but I beg to differ. I feel we are manufacturing and assembly line of failure conditions for African Americans in general and for young blacks in particular.

Drop Out Rate

A Time magazine article by Andrew J. Rotherham on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010 indicated that only 62% of African American students graduated high school in 2008. You can say this is the beginning of feeding the raw material into the assembly line. In a world where even a 4-year college degree does not guarantee someone the security of being employable, having less than a high school diploma is a recipe for constant struggle.

The lack of a high school diploma does not mean someone is automatically on the road to prison or unemployment, but the conditions that existed for someone in that situation to be successful have greatly diminished. An economy based upon an abundance of industrial, construction and agricultural jobs is a distant memory. The options are few for the unskilled and uneducated.

Prison The Human Warehouse

An article published on ABCnews.go.com by Pierre Thomas and Jason Ryan on

June 6, 2008 stated that, “Four percent of U.S. black males were in jail or prison last year, compared to 1.7 percent of Hispanic males and .7 percent of white males. In other words, black males were locked up at almost six times the rate of their white counterparts.”

Now some will say the prison rate and dropout rate can’t be necessarily connected, but the conditions for someone with limited options to become swept up in activity that may lead them to incarceration is logically higher. The inequity of drug sentencing laws are a factor, but being involved in activity for the laws to become a factor has more impact.

Joblessness

Next we have the issue of the unemployment rate in the black community. Being at 15.7% for the month of November 2010 compared to 8.4% for whites according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. That rate for black unemployment is 86% higher than whites and that is getting very close to double. An article by William Alden that was published on 09-30-10 in the Huffington Post indicated that those in prison don’t count in the unemployment rate. Can you imagine the unemployment rate if the African Americans in prison were counted in the statistics.

This seems to be a crisis by normal definitions and some other issues have not even been included here. The question is what can be done to stop the movement in these negative directions. There is not a group to march against, sit down to stage or organization to boycott. It is us. We need an intervention with ourselves. How do we do it, I’m open to suggestions.